Community group to fight San Onofre nuclear waste plan

Group forms to fight San Onofre nuclear waste plan, San Diego Union Tribune By Jeff McDonald June 2, 2016 Residents of San Diego and Orange counties concerned about the longterm storage of radioactive waste on the coast between Oceanside and San Clemente have organized a new coalition aimed at forcing the removal of tons of spent nuclear fuel.

The group, calling itself Secure Nuclear Waste, is comprised of lawyers, activists, a scientist, an elected official and an emergency-room physician. It is hosting a community meeting at Laguna Beach City Hall next Wednesday evening.

“The deadly radioactive waste is toxic to humans for millions of years,” the group said in a news release criticizing a California Coastal Commission storage permit approved in October. “If nothing is done, the waste could be buried on the beach as early as May 2017 for up to 300 years.”

Secure Nuclear Waste said it organized as a counter to the Community Engagement Panel, a group of volunteers convened by plant owner Southern California Edison to meet regularly and discuss decommissioning of the failed San Onofre nuclear plant.

The new group complained that the Community Engagement Panel unfairly favors Edison and is not truly representative of the public……..

Members of Secure Nuclear Waste include San Diego consumer attorneys Michael Aguirre and Maria Severson. It also includes Charles Langley of the consumer group Public Watchdog, geologist Robert Pope and transportation consultant Nina Babiarz.

San Juan Capistrano Mayor Pam Patterson, who serves on the Community Engagement Panel due to her elected office, also joined Secure Nuclear Waste. She said the official group is not independent and not forceful enough opposing onsite spent-fuel storage at San Onofre.

“People on the Community Engagement Panel have been hand-picked because they are candy-coating the situation,” Patterson said. “The community needs to understand what’s going on is not in anybody’s best interest. It’s scary what they are doing.”

The Coastal Commission permit, now the subject of a lawsuit filed by the Aguirre & Severson law firm, allows Edison to store 1,600 tons of spent fuel in underground canisters just north of the shuttered nuclear reactors.

The spent fuel historically has been stored in above-ground cooling ponds but Edison is in the process of transferring the waste into steel-lined casks. More than 100 of the 45-ton canisters will then be buried in a massive tomb embedded in the beach.

Critics say the plan does not allow for monitoring the canisters for future degradation or leaks and presents a health threat to the millions of people who live and travel through the region. They say regulators should do a better job mitigating the longterm threat.

“It is an outrage that taxpayers are funding politically appointed bureaucrats at state agencies to create a deadly toxic waste landfill next to an interstate highway and the Los Angeles-San Diego coastal rail corridor,” said Babiarz, the transportation consultant and coalition member. “Our two counties have united to fight this threat to public safety.”……

Don’t believe the spin on thorium being a greener nuclear option http://tinyurl.com/zk8jt3a Ecologist: thorium is merely a way of deflecting attention and criticism from the dangers of the uranium fuel cycle and excusing the pumping of more money into the industry. It produces less radioactive waste and more power but it remains unproven on a commercial scale. ‘Even if thorium technology does progress to the point where it might be commercially viable, it will face the same problems as conventional nuclear: it is not renewable or sustainable and cannot effectively connect to smart grids. The technology is not tried and tested, and none of the main players is interested. Thorium reactors are no more than a distraction.

To listen to Dr. Caldicott’s earlier interviews with Dr. Makhijani, click HERE Best of 2008/2009: Dr. Arjun Makhijani on a clean-energy future without nuclear power, oil or coal http://tinyurl.com/z6b48l7

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HERE: Dr. Arjun Makhijani on the stunning potential for solar, wind and other green energy to replace fossil fuels and nuclear power right now http://tinyurl.com/j9s93mh

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and HERE. Why nuclear power is not the solution to global warming, and how renewables can power everythinghttp://tinyurl.com/hg72gf2

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Did you know every thorium reactor would require a reprocessing center? Also #Thorium Reactor would be enriching bomb grade material and present a bigger proliferation problem. Also problems getting heat sink from the intense heat that is generated and you have to worry about capturing all the deadly isotopes that are created. Have not worked out the kinks of sodium circuit boards frying.

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Without exception, [thorium reactors] have never been commercially viable, nor do any of the intended new designs even remotely seem to be viable. Like all nuclear power production they rely on extensive taxpayer subsidies; the only difference is that with thorium and other breeder reactors these are of an order of magnitude greater, which is why no government has ever continued their funding.’

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All other issues aside, thorium is still nuclear energy, say environmentalists, its reactors disgorging the same toxic byproducts and fissile waste with the same millennial half-lives. Oliver Tickell, author of Kyoto2, says the fission materials produced from thorium are of a different spectrum to those from uranium-235, but ‘include many dangerous-to-health alpha and beta emitters’.

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Tickell says thorium reactors would not reduce the volume of waste from uranium reactors. ‘It will create a whole new volume of radioactive waste from previously radio-inert thorium, on top of the waste from uranium reactors. Looked at in these terms, it’s a way of multiplying the volume of radioactive waste humanity can create several times over.’

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Thorium cannot in itself power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive isotope uranium-233 – ‘so these are really U-233 reactors,’ says Karamoskos.

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This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors, he adds, because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium’s superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste. http://tinyurl.com/zk8jt3a

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Check out Helen Caldicott Playlist http://tinyurl.com/hgbxqv6 is an Australian physician, author, and anti-nuclear advocate who has founded several associations dedicated to opposing the use of nuclear power, depleted uranium munitions, nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons proliferation, war, and…